


Freeze and Seal in Plastic to Prevent Spoilage

by kayliemalinza



Category: Torchwood
Genre: Gen, Icky, Surreal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-04-07
Updated: 2009-04-07
Packaged: 2017-10-27 06:07:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 755
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/292446
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kayliemalinza/pseuds/kayliemalinza
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ianto walks across a darkened room. No, really.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Freeze and Seal in Plastic to Prevent Spoilage

Ianto crept as softly as he could do past the metal shelves. The finely-tailored shoulder of his jacket crinkled on some plastic and he stiffened, stun gun at the ready. His ears were satellite dishes waiting for a message from the black forever of a restaurant's dry storage.

His leg hurt.

Ianto kept listening, distracted by the trickle of blood wending down his calf. Just a scratch, a flesh wound. His leg still worked. He could leap and kick and scuttle if he needed to. His fingers ached from being wrapped about his gun but that was hardly troubling, was it? Once he got back into the light he'd see the skin there depressed and red but the problem would resolve itself in a few minutes and surely his leg would, too. Ianto was worried over nothing.

He'd be worried less, he conceded, if his trim black trousers were plastic or something else that would keep out air and liquid; something that would not have exposed his leg-wound to the plumes of yellow steam unfurling outside in the alley. The steam was maybe gastrointestinal effluvium from an alien corpse but Ianto was only guessing that the mass of pulp and slime was once a body. It could just as easily have been semen or a midnight snack. Who knew what protozoans had been floating through the air, hoping to worm into the crannies of his open wound?

Ianto pressed his shoulders into the shelf behind him and tried to stop himself from thinking. His brain was dizzy-sick with aimless fretting but that was familiar, understandable. He was victim to adrenaline, not an alien psychotropic. He assured himself that the soft-napped darkness held no threats except some wayward foodstuffs and Ianto certainly knew how to handle those. Why, he battled biscuit tins and coffee filters before breakfast! Ramen packets quivered at his approach in uni and his humble refrigerator held such a range of items that a lesser mortal, surely, would be daunted.

Ianto consoled himself with thoughts of garlic bread arranged precisely on a plate as he ventured through the darkness. He slid his shoes carefully along the bottom seams of boxes to keep from tripping over them. The door was glowing faintly at the edges from the room beyond and Ianto reached a hand out to see if he could touch it, to see how thoroughly the dark was wreaking havoc with his depth perception. His calf was sparking with a subtle pain and his trouser leg was ghosting closer to the wound. Last he checked it wasn't bleeding badly but a single trickle would be enough to make the fabric stick. Was there yellow steam inside the fibers? Had he been un-infected to this point but now would feel a poison drifting through his blood?

Ianto had his fingers still outstretched and thought they might be trembling. He could not be sure without looking but his hand felt shaky, unreserved. It occurred to him that the spill of monster guts aside, his trousers may have been dyed with something toxic. This was a new pair, only dry-cleaned once. Can ET pathogens be killed by dry-clean chemicals? he wondered. Was this fabric's dye so fine because it had been burnt black by a different sun? Ianto thought of a beast with knobbled fingers stooping by a vat with bolts of woolens bubbling in the ink. It would be easy for a batch of skin cells to sprinkle from the fingers to the vat or even worse, translucent flakes of eczema. Ianto could not imagine how an eczemic alien would become a master dyer but it hardly mattered. Torchwood, like Alice's White Queen, compelled one to believe in the impossible (sometimes even before breakfast.)

Ianto's hands were still reaching into nothing but he spared the left one to waver down and tug his trouser leg. If the fabric didn't touch the injury it couldn't harm him. He was sure of this; he had to be or else he'd waver in his task. The outline of the door was glowing larger and his shoe-soles scraped efficiently against the boxes. Once in the light, he told himself, he would take a good look at his wound and see how silly he had been. It was just a scratch and there was nothing lurking in the flesh that cotton swabs and hydrogen peroxide couldn't handle. He just had to touch the door and everything would be alright. I'm almost there, he told himself. I'm almost to the end.


End file.
